House to vote on electing conservative hardliner Jim Jordan as speaker – US politics live

If he is elected speaker, Democrats will use accusations of extremism against Jim Jordan in their campaign to retake the House majority next year, according to a memo obtained by the Guardian’s US politics live blog.

“It is imperative that our caucus makes clear to voters just how extreme Congressman Jordan is and how his Speakership would negatively impact working families across the country, threaten democratic norms, and weaken relationships with our allies,” according to the document from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), which is tasked with winning the party seats in the House.

The memo, which is dated today and addressed to House Democrats, suggests a number of messages for lawmakers, including that Republicans who support Jordan are doing the bidding of Donald Trump, and that the potential speaker “has shown voters just how extreme he is and there is no indication that he’ll moderate himself in any way if he becomes speaker. In fact, he’ll pull the entire Republican caucus even further to the right.”

It also encourages lawmakers to cast the entire House GOP as in the thralls of extremists. “It appears there are no more moderates left in the Republican conference capable of standing up to the far right,” the document reads.

Democrats are four seats away from seizing the majority in next year’s elections, and to accomplish that, the DCCC is focused on ousting 18 Republican lawmakers who represent districts where votes supported Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

“The DCCC is committed to ensuring that every battleground Member of the Republican conference who stands and votes for a Speaker Jordan will be making a career ending move,” the memo concludes.

Democratic lawmakers just received their marching orders from Katherine Clark, the party’s whip: vote minority leader Hakeem Jeffries for speaker.

“House Democrats are urged to vote for Leader Hakeem Jeffries for Speaker,” she wrote in an email to lawmakers.

There’s no chance of Jeffries winning the post, but voting for their guy is what lawmakers in the House minority always do. Of course, votes for House speaker usually happen at the start of a new Congress, not in the middle of one, but here we are.

The battle over speaker of the House is more or less an internal Republican affair, but as Punchbowl News reports, Democrats do have some contingency plans for today as they eye winning back the House majority in next year’s elections:

“That fucking guy Jim Jordan”. Those five words may as well as any sum up the career of Jim Jordan, who, since arriving in the House in 2007 to represent his Ohio district, has been at the vanguard of the chamber’s right wing.

And like many of his persuasion in Congress, Donald Trump has been a boon for Jordan’s standing. He boosted his national profile as a defender of Trump during his presidency, and continued doing so after his violent departure from office, prompting Liz Cheney, a Republican antagonist who would lose her seat in Congress at Trump’s urging, to describe Jordan with the aforementioned words.

Today could end with Jordan as the 56th speaker of the House. For more on him, here’s the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly:

Jim Jordan, the Ohio congressman who is seeking to become House speaker, is a prominent celebrity on the far right of US politics – and a magnet for controversy who a former speaker from his own party once called a “political terrorist”.

Jordan, 59, was elected to Congress in 2006 from a conservative, rural district of Ohio. A high school and college wrestling champion, he made his mark on the House as a founder of the hard-right Freedom caucus, helping oust two speakers, John Boehner and Paul Ryan, who were not deemed sufficiently extreme.

But Jordan has not been free of controversy himself. He has long been dogged by questions about a sexual abuse scandal at Ohio State University, where he was a wrestling coach before he entered politics, while the full extent of his involvement in Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, leading up to the deadly attack on Congress, remains unknown.

In the last Congress, when Democrats held the gavel, Jordan refused to cooperate with the House January 6 committee, despite being served with a subpoena.

But his involvement in Trump’s machinations has been widely reported. He is known, for instance, to have spoken with the then president on the morning of the riot.

Good morning, US politics blog readers. Jim Jordan has empowered conservatives in the House of Representatives, promoted Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election and led the campaign to impeach Joe Biden. At the end of the day, he could be the next speaker of the chamber – or not. While Jordan last week won the party’s nomination to replace the ousted Kevin McCarthy as its leader, it is unclear if he has the votes necessary to win the gavel. Democrats will not support him, so Jordan needs 217 votes – near unanimity – from Republicans, but many of the party’s lawmakers are either undecided, or outright opposed to his candidacy.

Just like the vote two weeks ago that removed McCarthy from the speaker’s chair for the first time in American history, it seems likely Jordan will enter the House with no clear idea of his fate. The vote may go to multiple rounds, just like the January election that got McCarthy into his short-lived leadership post. If Jordan triumphs, it will make an election denier and conservative firebrand second-in-line to the presidency, and one of the most important players in Washington. If he falls, the House GOP will likely sink back into the disarray it’s been mired in since McCarthy fell.

Like all good showdowns, this one begins at high noon, eastern time. We’ll be covering it live on this blog.

Here’s what else is going on today:

• Joe Biden is heading to Israel to “consult on next steps”, the White House said, as the country prepares for an invasion of the Gaza Strip in retaliation for Hamas’s terrorist attacks less than two weeks ago. For the latest on the conflict, follow our blog.

• Tim Scott, a Republican senator and president candidate, expressed his support for Israel at a Georgetown University event this morning. We’ll tell you more about that later.

• Biden’s press secretary Karine Jean Pierre will take questions from reporters on Air Force One as he flies to the Middle East.